Making Cover Art

Section 159 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 August 8 Monday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents)

This is a concise account of how I used Microsoft Photo Premium 10 to make a cover for my print on demand novel BAMBOO HORSES. The cover was accepted by the POD outfit lulu.com as being acceptable for a paperback book six inches wide by nine inches tall.

As of August 2005 the lulu.com site specifies that the optimum size for a cover for a paperback book six inches wide by nine inches tall is 1838 X 2775 pixels and that "files can be JPG, PNG, or GIF with a minimum resolution of 300dpi." I have absolutely no idea how you determine how many dots per inch (dpi) there are to an image. Maybe if you were using a scanner you might have the appropriate software. Anyway, what I did worked for the BAMBOO HORSES cover, which I was able to upload to lulu.com.

My first step was to make a bitmap image of 1838 X 2775 pixels using Microsoft's Paint program (ALL PROGRAMS -> ACCESSORIES -> PAINT) running under Windows XP Professional. To make the size I used IMAGE -> ATTRIBUTES and set the size in pixels. Looking at Paint now, I see there's a little notation saying "Resolution: 81 x 81 dots per inch". I don't know if that means 6,560 dots per inch or if it means something else.

Paint makes bitmap images.

Having made my bitmap image, I then colored it blue. COLORS -> EDIT COLORS then click on the box which looks blue. That gave me a blue background for the BAMBOO HORSES cover.

I opened Microsoft Word and set the background to blue. FORMAT -> BACKGROUND and choose the color from the palette. When you mouse over a color in Word, the name pops up, which it doesn't seem to do with Paint, so I matched the Word blue with the paint blue on a "looks like they match to me" basis.

In then used Word to make the lettering for BAMBOO HORSES, for which I used the font Algerian, and the name HUGH COOK, for which I used the font Engravers MT - I later distorted the HUGH COOK lettering when I was resizing it using Microsoft Photo Premium 10, so the result on the finished cover probably deviates from the original font.

I used my screen capture program to cut out the BAMBOO HORSES wording and the HUGH COOK wording, so I had two separate images, one for each set of words.

I chose the two cover photos I wanted to use, one of a fish in a bucket of blood (a photo I took in 2003 at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, Japan) and the other of some rocks (which I photographed at Kyoto in 2003).

I then had all the bits I needed to put together a collage with Microsoft Photo Premium 10, which seems to be able to mix and match images in various formats - certainly bitmap images and JPG images.

I then took my 1838 X 2775 pixel blue background image and opened it with Microsoft Photo Premium 10 by right-clicking and choosing Microsoft Photo Premium 10. That is, OPEN WITH -> MICROSOFT PHOTO PREMIUM 10.

I now had my background image open on the screen. I loaded the other bits and pieces onto the screen one by one, using FILE -> GET PICTURE FROM GALLERY -> LOOK ELSEWHERE. The most recently loaded image occupies the center while the other images congregate on the right under "Files".

Once all the images have been loaded, to move the background image to the center is just a simple matter of mousing over to the "Files" and doing a left click on the background image.

Other images that are to be placed on top of the background image can now be dragged and dropped from "Files", the one little trick being that an image that is dragged and dropped earlier is prioritized when it comes to deciding which sits behind which. For example, if you want the image saying BAMBOO HORSES to sit on top of the image of a fish in a bucket of blood, you should drag the fish onto the background first. When the BAMBOO HORSES image is dragged on later, the program understands (I think) that the BAMBOO HORSES image is designed to sit on top of the fish image, and not vice versa.

(I think I have this right.)

Having got all the pieces onto the central screen, I saved the image using FILE -> SAVE AS and selecting, as "file type", "Picture It! PNG Plus (*.png). This is a special version of the PNG format which allows images to be subsequently manipulated using Microsoft Photo Premium 10. If an image is saved as an ordinary png file then it is "flattened" and the pieces cannot be moved.

I then resized the various images and shoved them round the screen until I had the cover I was looking for, and I saved this cover as an ordinary PNG (portable network graphics) image, and it was this fairly massive image, 7.87 megabytes, which I successfully uploaded to lulu.com, a process which took over half an hour over a dial-up modem.

Making the BAMBOO HORSES cover was a lot of work because there was quite a bit of trial-and-error involved, but it was then really easy to go on and make a cover for a fantasy novel that I have in progress, TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, and a cover for my cancer memoir, CANCER PATIENT.

For the cover for TO FIND AND WAKE THE DREAMER, which is set in the city state of Oolong Morblock, I used a photo of one of Oolong Morblock's velociraptors, extremely fast subway express trains, and a photo of koi in one of Omblock's ancient carp ponds, this to match a description of Omblock given early in the book:-

Beyond his domestic space, the city stretched out, the city of stories, his beloved cosmopolitan metropolis, island after island of conurbation. Out in the wide world of the city, factories smoked and chuffered, leanly efficient and ultramodern; koi swam in cool elegance in ancient courtyards; and velociraptors, the fastest of Omblock's trains, tunneled through the hollows of the darkness, flashing past the platforms of neon-lit subway stations, so fast that the eye could not stabilize them, and they were here and gone in a blur of speed.

For the CANCER PATIENT cover I used two photos of Japan, because the main impact of my medical problems is that I have been temporarily exiled from my life in Japan. As well as using the title CANCER PATIENT and the name text HUGH COOK I also used a fragment of a CANCER PATIENT poem that I'm working on and which, when it is finished, will conclude the medical memoir.

The fragment that I chose reads:-

Hesitating on the cool gray edge of never,
On the brink of deletion ...

I chose gray as the color for the CANCER PATIENT book because, for me, gray is the color of cancer ... a washing out of existence. Exile. Routine. Boredom. Gray dreams and white hospital sheets.

My medical problems first showed up as eyesight problems in April of 2003, and in May of 2003 my parents visited Japan and we went to Kyoto together, so Kyoto is associated not just with the Japan from which I have been exiled but also with the first symptoms of the onset of my disease.

I chose a photo of a gray rock to go with the gray background and the gray feelings, and I chose a photo of a golden temple to symbolize the promise of the future. The golden temple, one of Kyoto's famous sights, also features, appropriated and renamed, in the BAMBOO HORSES novel, which I started writing in May of 2003, when my parents were visiting Japan.

After the family meeting, I have a couple of media interviews lined up. I'm planning to talk with a couple of journalists about our projected land sale, and, all going well, there will be some nice photo opportunities. For the photos, I want two of the bamboo horses which we at Udamana Holdings make and animate, primarily for the festival trade, to be in the foreground. And, in the background, visible across the waters of Saga Irado, the Sacred Turtle Pond, the sweeping golden roofs of Ginsasebo Utokawa, otherwise known as the Golden Dream Phoenix River Temple.

Anyway, to sum up, as a rule I'm not a fan of Microsoft products, which in my opinion tend to be bloated and over-complicated, but I've been very pleased with Microsoft Photo Premium 10, which has made it very easy for me to make collages. I've only scratched the surface of its capabilities and it can do much, more in the way of image manipulation.

I don't know what resources Microsoft Photo Premium 10 requires but I'm running it on a low-end ThinkPad, an R50e. Before I bought it, I had the experience of using Windows XP on a variety of machines at Internet cafes and other places, and noted that Windows' bloated operating system tended to run a little slowly, so at the time of purchase I splashed out for an extra gigabyte of RAM and I've found performance to be satisfactory. The computer will reliably play music while I'm doing other stuff, something that my old Windows 98 system would not do with rock solid reliability.

So, anyway, to run Microsoft Photo Premium 10 I personally am using a R50e ThinkPad with a fifteen inch screen, with 1,300,912 kb of RAM (roughly, a gigabyte plus, on top of that, another three hundred or so megabytes of RAM), and, as its processor, an "x86 Family 6 Model 9 Steppint 5", whatever that is. I don't know how fast the chip runs but it's fast enough for me.

I've got two complaints about the machine. One is that it's a bit heavy to lug around, but that's a natural consequence of buying a low-end machine. The other is that the fan sometimes makes a bit of noise. Which doesn't worry me, because I don't notice it if I'm working away, but it has a tendency to irritate other people if I wander away and leave the machine running.

That wraps up my account of how I made my covers.

I think there's more stuff about making covers on the lulu.com site if you want to nose around checking stuff out ... personally I've been finding it just a little bit difficult to find the facts that I wanted when I wanted to find them. Actually going through the process of uploading a novel for print on demand publication clarified things for me.

As far as uploading the BAMBOO HORSES novel on lulu.com goes, my step-by-step account of that process is in the file Uploading A Novel.

(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents)